Some of you know the name some of you don’t.
Giphy – An application for searching and applying GIFs on your device. Giphy can be integrated into your keyboard for easy access.
But should you….
Everyone already knows data is the new gold, it is valuable and everyone is looking to obtain every piece of information they can about you. Why are we this popular? Well, the more data the more precise advertisements can be made specific to you which increases the cost of the ad.
Every application you download on your phone most likely will collect data about you to some extent from your mobile phone.
From Twitter to TikTok every application is tracking what you do, what you buy, where you go, what you search for, other general info such as how often you charge your phone and Lord knows what else.
I’d like to stick with Giphy for this topic.
When setting up my new phone I downloaded Giphy, which prompt this idea of how dangerous direct access to your keyboard .
You use your keyboard to enter all the information that is inputted into your phone (Voice is not there yet). Every password, every piece of sensitive data is inputted though the keyboard which makes any application that has access to the keyboard extremely risky.
With that being said if Giphy were every compromised, consider that malicious parties would then have access to users keyboards. This is a bit of stretch but consider the access Giphy requires on a mobile phone to access the keyboard it is possible.
I still have Giphy installed on my device but I decided to avoid allowing it access to my keyboard.
Instead I can open the Giphy application, find a GIF I’d like then copy/paste where I’d like to use it.
This is not as easy as adding it to my keyboard but it is not difficult.
Giphy is a fine company, but my fear is that level of access it seeks is too high for essentially any company. Consider Giphy had been owned by Meta but just recently was sold to Shutterstock.
In my experience, Facebook and Instagram are the worst offenders, I refuse to download either on my phone. Instagram and Facebook pull the same data Twitter does in addition to financial, health and sensitive information, I have no idea why Meta pulls this info but it paints the picture that you truly are the product when using Instagram or Facebook.
